Workforce Development Resources

A bold plan is being embarked upon by the city of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, that could offer a sustainable and attractive city center road delivery alternative. Because of its narrow streets, Amsterdam's city center has had a chronic access problem for trucks. Hurried deliveries, increased morning rush hour traffic congestion, and increased emissions have resulted from truck deliveries, which are limited to 7:00-11:00 in the morning. Set up for cargo tram operations, the company City Cargo Amsterdam drew up plans to bring the concept of using light-rail vehicles (LRVs) for freight delivery purposes after a local entrepreneur saw the concept being used at Dresden, Germany's Volkswagen plant. A small-scale trial was approved by the Amsterdam city council in November 2006 and implemented in March 2007. Approximately 150 million Euros are being invested in the project's initial phase. Under the plan, freight will be unloaded from trucks, grouped by destination, and then loaded onto cargo trams. After the trams are unloaded at inner city transfer hubs, the freight will then be transferred into E-cars, small electrically-powered road vehicles, for delivery to customers.

$1.2 million in grants is being allocated toward funding for a LBCC Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) Education program. Aimed at addressing the shortage in trained workers in the LNG Technology Field

In comparison to intercity freight transport or urban personal travel, very little is known about urban commercial vehicle movements. Urban commercial vehicle movements, which comprise about 10% of total trips made in the cities studied, exert a proportionally higher influence in terms of Paper 376 2 congestion, emissions and pavement wear due to the size and performance of the vehicles in the urban commercial fleet. However, the understanding gained from studies of intercity commercial movement does not apply in the urban context; intercity movements are almost entirely goods movements made by large commercial vehicles. In contrast, in an urban context, there are more movements for services than there are for goods, and more by light commercial vehicles (passenger cars, vans and pick-up trucks) than by heavier vehicles. This paper presents an aggregate analysis of urban commercial vehicle movements in the cities of Calgary and Edmonton, the two principal cities in the Province of Alberta in Canada. This analysis includes comparisons between the cities, as well as comparisons with the personal vehicle travel within the cities. Some of the major dimensions studied include the makeup of the commercial vehicle fleet, the time patterns of commercial traffic, travel purposes, origin-destination patterns, analysis of shipping establishment industry and type of commodity carried.

Los Angeles Harbor College is modifying and creating its Global Supply Chain Management/Logistics and International Business curriculum to understand the labor and industry needs for the Global Supply Chain Management and International Business sectors

The research project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education of Research examines the impact of B2C E-Commerce on transport in urban areas for the base year 2003. The impact analysis is based on empirical data which was derived from consumer survey. In addition, information about delivery traffic was acquired by B2C merchants and logistics providers. The results of this research project show that B2C E-Commerce leads to a reduction of private shopping traffic and an increase in delivery traffic. The future affects of B2C E-Commerce on transport depends primarily on the development of internet shopping and the adoption of delivery concepts. An understanding of the issues entailed in pick-up and delivery traffic can enable municipal traffic policies to counter the negative effects of B2C E-Commerce on traffic.

The two-part California Regional Economies- Industry Clusters of Opportunity User Guide is designed to assist workforce and economic development professionals with the key steps needed to develop economic data sets that can be used to drive decision-making across many areas including strategic planning, investment decisions and policy changes. The guide provides a step-by-step methodology of how to identify industry clusters of opportunity, and how to use this information for planning, policy and program investment decision-making. Part I of the User Guide shows how to develop regional clusters of opportunity dataset and provides a step-by-step guide to analyzing and interpreting the data. Part II of the User Guide explains how to put a cluster of opportunity dataset to work, using the data to inform decision-making and to mobilize cluster employers as full partners in workforce and economic development.

Freight movement is essential to the function of metropolitan areas, yet generates many externalities, including congestion, air pollution, noise, and greenhouse gas emissions. Metropolitan areas around the world are seeking ways to manage urban freight and its impacts. This paper presents the results from a comprehensive international survey of urban freight management strategies. The objective was to examine the effectiveness of alternative strategies and assess their transferability for U.S. implementation. Three categories were used to describe urban freight strategies: last-mile or first-mile deliveries and pickups, environmental mitigation, and trade node strategies. Many possibilities were found for the improved management of urban freight and its impacts; these possibilities included labeling and certification programs, incentive-based programs for voluntary emissions reduction, local land use and parking policies, and more stringent national fuel efficiency and emissions standards for heavy-duty trucks. More research is needed on intrametropolitan freight movements and on the effectiveness of existing policies and strategies.

With the increasing amount of traffic information collected through floating car data, it is highly desirable to find meaningful
traffic patterns such as congestion patterns from the accumulated massive historical dataset. It is however challenging due to
the huge size of the dataset and the complexity and dynamics of traffic phenomena. A novel floating car data analysis method
based on data cube for congestion pattern exploration is proposed in this paper. This method is different from traditional
methods that depend only on numerical statistics of traffic data. The view of the event or spatial-temporal progress is adapted
to model and measure traffic congestions. According to a multi-dimensional analysis framework, the traffic congestion event
is first identified based on spatial-temporal related relationship of slow-speed road segment. Then, it is aggregated by a cluster
style to get the traffic pattern on a different level of detail of spatial-temporal dimension. Aggregated location, time period and
duration time for recurrent and important congestions are used to represent the congestion pattern. We evaluate our methods
using a historical traffic dataset collected from about 12000 taxi-based floating cars for one week in a large urban area.
Results show that the method can effectively identify and summarize the congestion pattern with efficient computation and
reduced storage cost.

Paper describes a summer program in Northern California designed to educate high school students about transportation issues and how to deal with and solve these issues. Student's learning included diesel emission effects, traffic light timing, and pedestrian friendliness.

Trains operating in densely populated metropolitan areas typically encounter complex trackage configurations. To make optimal use of the available rail capacity, some portions of the rail network may consist of single-track lines while other locations may consist of double- or triple-track lines. This paper develops a branch-and-bound procedure for determining the optimal dispatching times for trains traveling in complex rail networks. We demonstrate the efficiency of our branch-and-bound algorithm by comparing it to CPLEX, a commercially available integer program solver, on an actual rail network in Los Angeles County.

We study the problem of determining the number of vehicles needed to provide a demand responsive transit service with a predetermined quality for the user in terms of waiting time at the stops and maximum allowed detour. We propose a probabilistic model that requires only the knowledge of the distribution of the demand over the service area and the quality of the service in terms of time windows associated of pickup and delivery nodes. This methodology can be much more effective and straightforward compared to a simulation approach whenever detailed data on demand patterns are not available. Computational results under a fairly broad range of test problems show that our model can provide an estimation of the required size of the fleet in several different scenarios.

In this paper we present a parallel regret insertion heuristic to solve a dial-a-ride problem with time windows. A new route initialization procedure is implemented, that keeps into account both the spatial and the temporal aspects of the problem, and a regret insertion is then performed to serve the remaining requests. The considered operating scenario is representative of a large-scale dial-a-ride program in Los Angeles County. The proposed algorithm was tested on data sets of 500 and 1000 requests built from data of paratransit service in this area. The computational results show the effectiveness of this approach in terms of trading-off solution quality and computational times. The latter measure being especially important in large-scale systems where numerous daily requests need to be processed.

Freight transport has a minor role in transport planning procedures in most cities, although freight transport operations represent a substantial proportion of emissions. The focus in this research is the local authority perspective of sustainable urban freight transport and the aim is to contribute to the understanding of how freight transport affects the urban environment and how awareness and knowledge within the local authority effects the urban freight transport situation. The analysis is based on four studies: a literature study, a review of transport in three cities via in-depth interviews, a review of freight in four cities via in depth interviews and finally a review of freight in all Swedish cities via a questionnaire survey. Three aspects are considered throughout the research: the sustainability concept, knowledge and awareness as well as barriers and drivers. The results confirm that knowledge and awareness in the area of urban freight transport is low, which generates a low level of interest in the subject and makes it hard to predict outcomes of certain actions. The implication for local authorities is that the issue of urban freight transport should gain a higher priority on the agenda.